John Osteen

John Osteen (21 August 1921-23 January 1999) was an American pastor and the founding pastor of the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas.

Biography
John Osteen was born in Paris, Texas in 1921, and he became a preacher in 1939 and was ordained to the gospel ministry by the Southern Baptist Convention shortly before his 18th birthday. In the late 1940s, he became a minister at a Baptist church in Hamlin, and he became an itinerant preacher in 1948 and ultimately settled in Baytown. During the 1950s, he went through a divorce, a remarriage, and ecstatic religious experiences which he claimed came from "baptism of the Holy Ghost". On 10 July 1959, he started the Lakewood Baptist Church in an abandoned feed store, and he dropped the "Baptist" label to turn his church into a charismatic and nondenominational church which eventually came to have 15,000 congregants. During the mid-1980s, he founded the Lakewood Bible Institute, and it closed down in the late 1980s. He hosted the weekly John Osteen program for 16 years, reaching millions worldwide. He died in 1999 at the age of 77, and his youngest son Joel Osteen later became the pastor.